Property deeds in Syracuse name exact “military tracts” from the 1790s. The Central New York (CNY) Military Tract was a survey grid over almost 2 million acres of unceded Haudenosaunee land, divided into 27 townships, each with 100 600-acre rectangular tracts. After the US revolutionary war, New York State gave out by lottery these tracts to former soldiers, including those who participated in the 1779 genocidal Sullivan-Clinton expedition and Van Schaick’s raid. New York officials and speculators violated nation-to-nation treaties, such as the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which guaranteed the lands of Central New York to the Onondaga Nation and holds to the present. Onondaga and other Haudenosaunee leaders condemned the violations as “a fraudulent means of possessing our Country, without paying the Value or any part thereof, for the good of the Nations in General to whom the lands belong.”1
Original 1792 map of Central New York by Simeon Dewitt, surveyor general of the continental army. The map shows the Central New York Military Tract and each township named for Greek, Roman, English, and Carthaginian historical figures. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Land into Private Property
The CNY Military Tract involved a deep violence of making land into property. The lands of the Onondaga Nation are collectively owned and pass through the female line, as conveyed in the Great Law of Peace. Clan Mothers are leaders in stewardship for the lands and agriculture, and the concept of “ownership” more closely means a relation with reciprocal duties and obligations. Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous authors highlight the Doctrine of Discovery – 15th century papal bulls that authorized European nations to conquer or enslave non-Christians and their lands in the Americas and Africa. The doctrine is codified into US law and undergirds US landownership to the present.2
Land speculation
Land speculators dominated New York’s land economy in the 1790s, as few veterans took up the tract the lottery awarded them. Speculators rapidly bought military tract lands – values rose as speculators monopolized land and realized its worth – and then sold them at higher prices. The most prolific speculator was William John Vredenburgh, a continental army captain, New York City merchant, and descendant of Dutch East India Company traders. Vredenburgh acquired over 60,000 acres in New York and 74 military patents across 12 townships, including lots 4, 40, 60, 69, 72, 77, and 80 in Manlius. Vredenburgh earned enormous returns. In a mere 6 months in 1793, Vredenburgh purchased and then sold Manlius tract 60, a future site of Scottholm, for a gain of 588 percent.
Land speculation prepared the ground for later forms of real estate. Speculators used military tract lands across Marcellus, Fabius, and Aurelius to: site mills and furnace industries; lease to other mill owners and take revenue in rent; front collateral on other investments; and buy shares of turnpike, railroad, and canal companies, which would facilitate capital accumulation across New York and globally. Speculators also bequeathed wealth to sons and sons-in-law as the heads of household, keeping patriarchal forms of family and property ownership.3
Caribbean slavery, trade, and revolution
Many land speculators were also New York City merchants invested in plantations of the Caribbean and Latin America. As a merchant, Vredenburgh owned 14 ships that carried cotton, sugar, coffee, and other commodities – the products of enslaved African labor – from ports in Haiti, Jamaica, St. Croix, St. Kitts, Honduras, and Colombia from 1793 to 1799. These merchants explicitly feared the world-transforming Haitian Revolution, which was threatening in itself to the white supremacist order, and independence and subsequent land reform – redistributing land from white slaveowners to free Haitian farmers – would remove a lucrative market from merchants’ control. Merchants also feared the example and spread of revolution throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and the US South. In 1802, a merchant-speculator wrote of the Haitian Revolution: “it was apprehended the Whites would be compelled to evacuate that unfortunate Island, as the Insurgent Negroes were hemming them in on every quarter… These most distressing Events… will have an unfortunate influence in the neighboring Islands & Colonies, & must no doubt enhance the prices of their produce.”4
William Vredenburgh shipping invoice for 1796 through the New York City mercantile firm Carrick and Westphal. Entries mention the commodities coffee, cotton, and sugar, contents of Vredenburgh’s trade ships Charlotte, Esther, and Nancy, and “Coffee at 5.c for Schooner Betsy from Gonaives,” a port city in Haiti. Courtesy of the Onondaga Historical Association.
Suburban “improvement”
Wealth from land speculation and trade in slavery poured into Central New York’s economy in the 1790s. The CNY Military Tract, and related speculation and trade, created a regime of private property in land that, over a century later, real estate developers used to create suburbs with racist covenants. In the early 1900s, developers referred to farmlands on the outskirts of the city – white settler homesteads or military tracts since the late 1700s – as “unimproved” land to be made valuable through suburban housing. “Improvement” meant building upon a foundation of ongoing genocide, colonialism, and expropriation.5
1938 atlas of Syracuse, New York showing continuity from military tract (Manlius) to white settler farmstead owners (Bingle, Kinne, and Kellogg families) to suburb with covenants (Dewittshire, Lyndonlea, and Lynacres that carried racist covenants from J.W. Clark Real Estate Co. Inc). Courtesy of Franklin Maps, with assistance from Syracuse University Digital Library.
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![Handwritten, in cursive, shipping invoice document. The top reads: “Mr William Vredenburgh in [act cert./concert] with Carrick and Westphal at New York.” There are two columns of entries for 1796, with respective amounts. Entries mention bales of cotton and bags of sugar, contents of the ships Charlotte, Esther, Eliza, Harriet, Nancy, and Sally, and “Coffee at 5.c for Schooner Betsy from Gonaives.”](https://syracusecovenants.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/VredenburghShippingInvoice1796-1024x767.jpeg)
